1. Field
The following description relates to booting a computing device using a boot image, and more particularly, to a method of generating a boot image that is reduced in size in a computing system that executes a snapshot-based boot.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various types of embedded devices, for example, an MP3 player, a mobile phone, a portable multimedia player (PMP), and a personal digital assistant (PDA) are widely used as personal portable devices, and considered as daily necessities. To further increase the use of these devices, more attention has been placed on boot time as an important factor.
Recently, a size of an operating system (OS) of a variety of devices have increased, for example, a feature rich OS such as Linux kernel-based OS or Android OS including Linux kernel which may be applied to consumer electronic (CE) devices, for example, a smart phone, a smart TV, a digital TV, a camcorder, a netbook/notebook computer, and the like. As a result, boot time of such devices has increased in proportion.
Because of this increase in boot time, a user may experience inconvenience in waiting for a system to boot up, and in addition, the long boot time may make the user miss critical time for performing a desired task utilizing the system.
In a general booting method, it takes a substantial amount of time to sequentially load software components used for booting. To reduce such long boot time, a snapshot-based boot technique has been introduced.
The snapshot-based boot technique halts currently executing processes, stores various memory data and register values in an auxiliary memory in the form of snapshot images, and at the time of next boot-up, reads the snapshot images stored in the auxiliary memory, and restores the memory data and register values to expedite the booting process without additional kernel initialization.
However, as the number of services running during system runtime increases, a size of the snapshot image increases as well, resulting in a lengthened boot time.